Our long-term Alcazar has done all sorts of jobs since it joined the fleet. City runs, airport pickups, the odd weekend getaway. But nothing quite like what it was asked to do recently. It had to play support car for our camera crew shooting a feature on the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, and that meant a 2,700km round trip between Mumbai and Delhi with barely a day’s rest in between.
I wasn’t driving the entire way myself, and the Alcazar was only handed over to me in Delhi by one of our drivers. His enthusiasm to ask me if we needed him to drive it back to Mumbai was a testament of how impressed he really was with the Alcazar.
The brief was simple. The Alcazar had to carry three crew members and all their camera gear along with all our luggage. This is exactly the kind of job our Alcazar has proven good at before, and it didn’t disappoint this time either. With the third row folded flat, the boot swallowed almost everything.
The captain seats in the second row turned out to be a real boon, especially for the camera crew – super comfy during a long day of shooting. The foldable tray table was handy for the laptop to copy and work on footage, and the fact that it was steady enough says a lot about the good build quality.
The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is where this car was always going to shine, and it did. Long, arrow-straight sections let the 1.5-litre turbo-petrol settle into an easy cruise. At 100kph in top gear, the engine barely feels stressed, and wind noise is well contained for a car this size. We clocked long hours driving in a single day on the way back, stopping only for fuel and food, and nobody complained of fatigue by the end of it.
The DCT, which I’ve spoken of before, is jerky in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but was not an issue here. Once you’re past 40kph and holding a steady throttle, it’s smooth and quick to respond. It’s really only the crawl through Mumbai and Delhi outskirts where its low-speed hesitation showed up.
The return leg we took had some patchy sections in Maharashtra, where the NE4 Expressway ends and connects to the old Golden Quadrilateral section of the highway. The Alcazar’s ride, tuned more for comfort on good surfaces, felt busy over broken patches. Nothing alarming, but the ride did feel slightly firmer than I expected from a car this size.
This stretch also penalised fuel efficiency. Loaded up with gear, four adults, and running the air conditioning at full blast through most of the drive, the trip computer settled at 12.8kmpl. That’s respectable for a heavy petrol SUV doing this kind of duty, but it’s definitely not the frugal numbers our diesel Alcazar managed, doing the same duty on the Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari run a few years back.
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A few other bits we did appreciate. The ventilated seats made the long hours of driving through the heat a lot more comfortable. The adaptive cruise control also was genuinely useful on the Expressway stretch, taking a lot of the fatigue out of long, straight sections. The absence of wireless Android Auto or Apple CarPlay was an irritant, as it meant connecting to the Infotainment using the cable and having a fully charged phone constantly plugged in for a long period of time.
Another observation on this trip: the plasticky bits on the dashboard picked up a fair bit of dust, especially with four people living out of the car for five days. To be honest, though, the camera crew kept the windows rolled down for a fair amount of time shooting. Thankfully, nothing a wipe down couldn’t fix.
At the end of it all, the Alcazar clocked close to 2,750km in five days absolutely fuss-free. No warning lights, no rattles that weren’t there before. It’s exactly the kind of trip that reminds you why a car like this earns its place in our long-term fleet. Not glamorous, not the fastest thing on the road, but dependable when you need it most. As it happens, this Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai run turned out to be its last big assignment with us. With this report, our time with the Alcazar comes to a close, and it’s headed back to Hyundai. It leaves the fleet the same way it arrived, quietly capable, and it’s fitting that its final outing was spent doing what it always did best, hauling people and gear over long distances without a fuss.
Gavin DSouza
Sergius Barretto
Hormazd Sorabjee
Nikhil Bhatia
Ameya Dandekar
